Nasa Launches `Made In Space` Label

September 15, 1985|By Jim Detjen. Knight-Ridder Newspapers.

BETHLEHEM, PA. — At first glance, the small bottle in Mohamed Aasser`s office appears to warrant no further attention. It contains a milky-white liquid that looks like it sat too long on some musty chemistry laboratory shelf.

But suspended in a fluid inside the nondescript bottle are $250,000 worth of microscopic plastic beads, the first commercial product ever made in space. ``It`s worth more than gold,`` said Aasser, a professor of chemical engineering at Lehigh University, as he swirled around the cloudy substance.

Indeed, at $83,333 an ounce, the tiny plastic beads are worth about 250 times the current value of gold. And they achieved a rare distinction last month when the National Bureau of Standards and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began marketing them.

``This material is the first of what we expect to be a long line of products to carry a `Made in space` label,`` said James Beggs, NASA`s administrator, in announcing the sale.

The tiny beads were manufactured on space shuttle flights using a chemical engineering process designed by Lehigh University researchers, including Aasser and John Vanderhoff, codirectors of Lehigh`s emulsion polymer institute. In April, the Lehigh researchers were named NASA`s ``inventors of the year`` for their work in developing the system.

The beads are so small that a microscope is needed to see a single particle. Each sphere is 10 microns--one hundredth of a millimeter--in diameter. About 18,000 of them can be placed on the head of a pin.

The National Bureau of Standards is selling them as microscopic yardsticks, tiny rulers against which the size of a red blood cell (7 microns wide) or a strand of hair (100 microns thick) can be measured. A finger-size vial containing 30 million plastic beads costs $384.

Federal officials say eight companies already have purchased the tiny spheres to help calibrate equipment that is used to make finely ground powdered products for copy-machine toners, paints and cosmetics.They say they expect that the microscopic spheres will be used for a number of other purposes, including air-pollution monitoring and research on cancer and glaucoma.

Until last month, the National Bureau of Standards had no measuring stick for 10 microns because it was impossible to manufacture uniform particles of that size on Earth.

The space shuttle changed all that.

Using NASA research money, the Lehigh team developed a way to manufacture the tiny spheres in the near-weightless conditions 100 to 200 miles above the Earth.

Aasser, 43, said the process of producing the spheres is similar to placing millions of tiny sponges into a tub of water. Microscopic ``seed``

spheres are mixed with an oily fluid that causes them to become saturated and swell. When the process is conducted on Earth, the expanded spheres rise to the surface where they clump together, distorting their shape.

``But in space, the spheres remain suspended in the fluid because of the lack of gravity, and they don`t stick together,`` Aasser said. That gives the chemical process time to be completed. When the reaction is over, the spheres are ``baked`` in a chemical reactor to retain their new, larger size.

Aasser said that the Lehigh team first proposed the experiment in 1975 and began working on it in 1978. The researchers designed the cylindrical reactors, and General Electric Co.`s Space Systems Division at Valley Forge, Pa., manufactured the equipment.

The tiny spheres were first produced on the space shuttle Columbia in March, 1982. The beads that are now on sale were manufactured in April, 1983, on the shuttle Challenger.

Aasser said that so far, the tiny spheres have been successfully made on four shuttle flights. The manufacturing process failed on a flight in June, 1982, because of power-supply problems. On future flights, including one scheduled for November, spheres as large as 100 microns are expected to be made.

Aasser said he and his Lehigh colleagues have formed their own company, known as Particle Technology Inc., which will produce the beads when their contract with the National Bureau of Standards has been completed.

``Nobody really expected that the first commercial product made in space would be tiny plastic beads,`` Aasser said.